Decentralized Health Data Distribution: a DLT-based Architecture for Data Protection

The management, protection and sharing of sensitive data such as those associated with the health domain are crucial in enabling personal care and contributing to worldwide medical advancements. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) allow for data protection compliant solutions in untrusted contexts that guarantee data immutability, protection and transparency when needed. This paper proposes an architecture based on DLTs, Smart Contracts and Distributed File Storage (DFS), enabling user data sovereignty, confidentiality and secure access control. A use case on health data is presented, where we apply a combination of DLT, DFS and an access control mechanism to allow users to distribute their data. Finally, we show an experimental evaluation of the overall architecture to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing practical DLT-based healthcare solutions. The results are collected through independent tests, available opensource, that verify the system's response time in each of its functions and as the load increases. The results are promising and show that the system is feasible and can scale as the load increases.